I’ve been off and on with the Fediverse for sometime now. It’s a relatively friendly place full of fellow nerds, but with a few caveats…
My feeds seem very focused on hard information be it Gaza, tech companies doing bad things, or people pitchforking about the lastest big bad in digital privacy. This is all well and good, but it does get a bit tired after a while. Seeing the samey stuff post after post by academic types makes me more informed but also mentally draining.
Where’s the fun? On Facebook and Instagram I see light fluffy popcorn type posts of people reminiscing over Nintendo games or reels of cockatiels being cockatiels. It’s fun to scroll and interact. Here it feels like I’m in a classroom, and people, while friendly, do get quite hostile if you don’t like Linux or Star Trek.
As a leftist I like it here because it’s my bubble of people, but I’d like to see the fedi let its hair down a bit. It’s okay to talk about stuff other than infosec, privacy guides, distros, and Gaza.
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Reddit began in a similar way - being very tech focused until it started to become much more mainstream.
Block instances which have nothing you want (foreign languages, for me)
Block communities spamming gaza / war / techbro
I like to browse new across all instances, and block rather than only view subscriptions
Block communities spamming gaza / war / techbro
I would agree with you if those communities were/are created to post content about gaza / war / techbro. But in most cases, those communities are generic, about news and technology, so when you block them, you also block other content that is not about gaza / war / techbro.
a lot of apps support key word blocking
There is no app for Kbin yet.
I have the same approach of browsing all and blocking what I don’t want as I come across it. Which in my case, happens to be mostly anime and shitposting communities.
Reddit began in a similar way - being very tech focused until it started to become much more mainstream.
I wasn’t at the beginning of Reddit, but I have been a user since 2013 and I always was confined in my little bubble of interests (I used it as a replacement of Feedly, so I pretty much created my curated content) it was not until the APIcalypse that it was mentioned over and over that r/all wasn’t even that good nowadays, and I was like, bruh, I should go there often, I did, and still do, but I still browse my curated content, whether is here or Reddit.
Dont forget engagement. IMO best part of fediverse.
Personally, I feel like you can have fun on fedi, but it all depends on the accounts/communities you follow. My Sharkey feed AND my Lemmy feed are both full of memes, fandom nonsense, and shitposts. If you only follow serious communities and people that talk about serious news, you’ll have a serious time.
That said, one thing that I thought was unpleasant about the fediverse, and then realised was a feature rather than a bug is… The fact that you can run out of fediverse content. After 2 hours on Lemmy, I have functionally read all of Lemmy (or, well, all the communities I care to read), and maybe 1 more hour to join conversations I’d like to join.
Compared to the seemingly infinite content stream of The Other Sites ™, this initially struck me as bad and weird, but then I realised… I actually prefer it this way. Doomscrolling a fedi site/app is actually not possible, and that has done wonders for my mental health.
The fact that you can run out of fediverse content. After 2 hours on Lemmy, I have functionally read all of Lemmy
I’ll add that if you are running out of things to read you can instead post content you want to discuss. I’ve found that much of the time there are people waiting to jump in and comment, they just aren’t in the habit of making posts. Which you didn’t need to do on other sites because there were always enough people posting content. And it’s less likely to leave you doom scrolling since it’s a good opportunity to stop since comments won’t come in immediately.
For the moment, a lot of the fun on some of the federated platforms is behind several steps of effort that many of the corporate platforms have streamlined people out of being accustomed to taking, which is part of why they’ve kept their larger audiences. If a single click/tap is too much, that’s enough to keep some people away from here.
It’s not a matter of laziness either, it’s more of, how much effort do I want to put into something that I’m using for casual entertainment? For many people it’s minimal, but many federated platforms currently don’t really work like that. They’ve arguably thrown the baby out with the bathwater in an overcorrection away from commercial algorithmic feeds since existing platforms have conditioned people to not have to put effort into finding silly/fun content.
The types of people to post won’t be as inclined to post if they find their posts aren’t reaching people because people mostly have to actively seek them out to engage with them at all. The types of people to more passively engage won’t be able to as easily as those posts they might engage with may never reach them because they mostly have to actively seek them out. The end result of a lack of feedback and content for both types of people, despite there being a possibility and existence of both for them, results in this recurring sense of dissatisfaction.
Note that this is written largely with Mastodon in mind, and to a lesser degree Lemmy. In Lemmy/Kbin/Mbin/PieFed/Sublinks’s cases I think they’re potentially better off in terms of structure and offering different ways to sort one’s feeds, but it’s a matter of more people joining to round out communities and discussion more.
Incredibly well thought out reply. Thank you!
People on here and on mastodon are really pessimistic overall I’ve found. I still need to go to Twitter despite all the bots and engagement farming going on these days if I want to learn about new product releases or the newest possibilities of the newest technology that was released just yesterday.
I feel like the only news that get shared here and that actually get engagement are the bad ones about the war in Ukraine or in Palestine, or about anti-minority laws but we never see the good news like the fact that France added abortion as a constitutional right.
A big factor is Lemmy was setup by tankies for tankies. So the constant spam of negative news about _______ western nation is on brand.
I see this as a positive. Instead of being fed content to keep me engaged by an algorithm until I suddenly realize the day is almost over and I didn’t really enjoy myself, I reach a point where I feel like I’m done for the day then I make plans, play a game, read, etc.
Now I read the news, fuck around on lemmy a bit, then actually get on with a “real” day.
Yeah I don’t really relate to the complaint because why does all your fun have to come from a single website? Does your online content have to be a one-stop shop? I just hop around Lemmy, Tildes, read sports news, maybe watch some cool videos on Youtube, etc etc. And when I’m bored with internet, I have other stuff IRL to do. Yeah I’m just not treating Lemmy like an endless scroll feed like Reddit or Instagram. I just check out what’s new (I might pop in a few times a day), participate if I want, and move on.
Yeah Lemmy, besides news and technology, is very quiet and I think it suffers from having communities fractured between instances, so niche interests get even less traffic than they would on Reddit. But my Mastodon feed is always busy and interesting. If it isn’t you’re not following the right people yet. I recommend some hashtag searches for things you’re interested in.
Lemmy really needs a concept of a “super-community”, some way to group different communities together and have that grouping be subscribeable. Maybe creating a post within a super-community will give the user the ability to automatically cross-post to all the individual communities, although this could be abuseable.
/kbin has got Collections, and PieFed has got topics. You may check either out.
Collections is exactly what I’d love to see added to lemmy. Especially if the collections has the ability to filter out posts cross posed to different communities.
/kbin crossposts are displayed as smaller, like on image (if you can see it :))
Edit: you can’t. Click fediverse logo to see it on /kbin
Big agree with this. One of the clients I messed with had a feature like this and it’s really nice. But we need something server-side to allow federated communities to pull from each other to create a river from separate streams as it were.
I follow lots of the the same communities across instances and that means often I’m seeing repeated posts, sometimes from different authors just to get the aggregate of things. This would be a huge boon to the usability too.
I recommend some keyword filters. I use them to reduce certain topics from my feed, specifically about certain wars or politicians or celebrities. I did the same thing on reddit to filter out some of the “awareness” campaigns where everyone posted about the FCC chair to every single sub.
I also just browse local communities instead of the entire fediverse. This defeats the purpose of the fediverse, but it drastically reduces the number of duplicate and NSFW communities. I then mute the communities I don’t want to see. I’ll also mute the hyper specific communities that usually have complete overlap with the more general community, i.e. dogs and dogpictures.
It takes some work to get your feed to your liking, but it’s worth it in the end. There’s still far less content available than on reddit, but the amount of quality content feels similar.
You’re our hero!
How do you stay in a community, but filter content you don’t want through keywords?
Honestly I don’t even bother subscribing to comminuted. Communities for me are opt-out via muting rather than opt-in via subscriptions. I still see posts from the news community even though I have several Gaza keywords filtered out.
The issue is that the majority of people on the Fediverse are “techies” with specific interests, which skews the spectrum of content quite a bit.
The Fediverse is in an awkward spot. It needs more people like you to keep technology communities from becoming Linux circlejerks, but at the same time those circlejerks are driving people like you out.
I don’t think there is really a conflict here though if we are all just nice to each other.
I think techy nerds are an absolutely fine foundation for a community so long as said techy nerds understand the inherent politics to being a techy nerd, having access to powerful computers and having the privilege of being in a highly skilled industry that pays fairly well (I know big generalization).
It is going to be awkward trying to expand the horizons to include a more diverse user base, but there is nothing wrong with awkwardness, just toxic behavior and gatekeeping.
Techy nerds just need to be willing to listen and evolve their understandings of community spaces. It seems like computer nerds are obsessed with visions of the internet before the masses of people and big corporations came onto it, but while that feeling is understandable it risks building a conceptual wall between people who are passionate about the capacity of computers to help people and the very people they want computers to help.
We can have a better more positive federation of communities than the internet has ever had if we decide right now to be more inclusive and radical in our solidarity with each other.
The Fedi is what you make of it. Since there’s no algorithm telling you who to follow or pushing posts to your feed, it’s up to you to curate who you follow.
My feed is a mixture of shit posts, memes, cats and dogs, flowers, a little politics and a little tech. Chaos is why I’m here and who I follow reflects that. If your feed is full of info you don’t care about, then you’re following the wrong people.
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Also, with no built-in mechanism for embedding, say, youtube or peertube videos, Lemmy just is a primarily text-driven site like reddit used to be, and while there will be reams of text written about such a disaster… the video drastically speaks for itself. So the dearth of video on Lemmy, especially embedded video that allows you to watch without leaving Lemmy is holding it back in certain arenas.
Video storage costs a lot, it’s not a surprise Lemmy chose not to support it, but here’s hoping maybe someday they add the ability to embed videos and have them function in-page.
The Photon UI for lemmy can play embedded videos.
Photon UI is so good, more people should use it instead of the default Lemmy UI.
^-^
Give it time. The porn on lemmy is growing exponentially, so the more varied content will start trickling in. My guess is roughly 3 more months before the memes really start to pick up
You’re a consumer. If you see something interesting post it to Fediverse so you can also be a contributor.
It sort of sounds like you want people to entertain you for free.
If you look at my profile you’ll see that’s not the case. I’ve been contributing quite a bit.
The only thing I’m missing from the fediverse is a platform where animations and animators can connect and share their work with the possibility of having it discovered. Pixelfed still isnt in the app stores, peertube is not user friendly and has no official apps, mastodon doesnt have amy kind of upvoting or algorithm or ability to browse lemmy communities, lemmy doesnt have native video support or user follows.
Fedi is the worst social media, except for all the others.
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